Nobody Can Complain When You Fart, If It’s For Science!

February 15, 2026 by No comments

There are some stories that you can tell a writer has enjoyed composing, and, likely, whoever wrote the piece for Medical Express reporting on new smart underwear to measure human flatulence was in their element. It follows a University of Maryland project to create a clip-on hydrogen sensor that can be attached to a set of underwear to monitor gaseous emissions.

Lest you think that this research has a non-serious tone to it, it seems that gastroenterologists have incomplete data on what constitutes normal activity. The aim of this research is to monitor a large number of people to create a human flatus atlas that will inform researchers for years to come. Better still, they’re recruiting, so if you’re a regular Johnny Fartpants who misspent their youth lighting farts while drunk and would like to atone, get in touch.

We know that gut problems can be no fun at all, so fart jokes aside, if this research makes advancements in their study, it can only be a good thing. Meanwhile, if you are one of those superproducers they mention, perhaps you need to build the FartMaster 3000.

GameCube Dock For Switch, Revisited.

February 15, 2026 by No comments

While modern game consoles are certainly excellent, there is still something magical about the consoles of yore. So why not bring the magical nostalgia of a GameCube controller to the excellent modern Switch series of consoles?

This isn’t [Dorison Hugo’s] first attempt at building a Switch dock, but with seven years of development, there are a lot of updates in the project to unpack. One version allows the user to play on the Switch’s screen instead of on a docked display, and another comes with a mechanical lock to prevent the console from being stolen. But what really caught our eye is the modifications made to the OEM Switch docks.

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The WalMart Atomic Clock

February 14, 2026 by 8 Comments

In the realm of first-world problems, your cheap wall clock doesn’t keep time, so you have to keep setting it. The answer? Of course, you connect it to NTP and synchronize the clock with an atomic time source. If you are familiar with how these generic quartz clock movements work, you can probably guess the first step is to gut the movement, leaving only the drive motor.

The motor is somewhat like a stepper motor. The ESP8266 processor can easily control the clock hands by sending pulses to the motor. The rest is simple network access and control. If the network time is ahead, the CPU gooses the clock a little. If it is behind, the CPU stalls the clock until it catches up.

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Real-Time 3D Room Mapping With ESP32, VL53L5CX Sensor And IMU

February 14, 2026 by 4 Comments

ST’s VL53L5CX is a very small 8×8 grid ranging sensor that can perform distance measurements at a distance of up to 4 meters. In a recent video,[Henrique Ferrolho] demonstrated that this little sensor can also be used to perform a 3D scan of a room. The sensor data can be combined with an IMU to add orientation information to the scan data. These data streams are then combined by an ESP32 MCU that streams the data as JSON to a connected computer.

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A marketing image of a Dash educational robot is shown. It is made of a triangle pyramid of four plastic spheres. Two of the base spheres house wheels, and the top sphere houses a speaker, lights, and sensors.

Reverse Engineering A Dash Robot With Ghidra

February 14, 2026 by No comments

One of the joys of browsing secondhand shops is the possibility of finding old, perhaps restorable or hackable, electronics at low prices. Admittedly, they usually seem to be old flat-screen TVs, cheap speakers, and Blu-ray players, but sometimes you find something like the Dash, an educational toy robot. When [Jonathan] came across one of these, he decided to use it as a turtle robot. However, he found the available Python libraries insufficient, and improving on them required some reverse-engineering.

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Vintage Canadian Video Hardware Becomes Homebrew Computer

February 14, 2026 by 5 Comments

Are you in the mood for a retrocomputing deep dive into the Scriptovision Super Micro Script? It was a Canadian-made vintage video titler from the 80s, and [Cameron Kaiser] has written up a journey of repair and reverse-engineering for it. But his work is far more than just a refurbish job; [Cameron] transforms the device into something not unlike 8-bit homebrew computers of the era, able to upload and run custom programs with a limited blister keypad for input, and displaying output on a composite video monitor.

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Windows 98 On A 2020 ThinkPad P14s Gen 1 Laptop

February 14, 2026 by 16 Comments

The lovely thing about the x86 architecture is its decades of backwards compatibility, which makes it possible to run 1990s operating systems on modern-day hardware, with relatively few obstacles in the way. Recently [Yeo Kheng Meng] did just that with Windows 98 SE on a 2020 ThinkPad P12s Gen 1, booting it alongside Windows 11 and Linux from the same NVMe drive.

Naturally, after previously getting MS-DOS 6.22 from 1994 running on a 2020 ThinkPad X13, the step to doing the same with Windows 98 SE wasn’t that large. The main obstacles that you face come in the form of UEFI and hardware driver support.

Both ThinkPad laptops have in common that they support UEFI-CSM mode, also known as ‘classical BIOS’, as UEFI boot wasn’t even a glimmer yet in some drunk engineer’s eye when Win98 was released. After this everything is about getting as many hardware drivers scrounged together as possible.

[Yeo] ended up having to bodge on a USB 2.0 expansion card via a Thunderbolt dock as Win98 doesn’t have xHCI (USB 3.0) support. With that issue successfully bodged around using a veritable tower of adapters, installing Windows 98 was as easy as nuking Secure Boot in the BIOS, enabling UEFI-CSM along with Thunderbolt BIOS assist mode and disable Kernel DMA protection.

Because UEFI-CSM implementations tend to be buggy, the CREGFIX DOS driver was used to smooth things over. Another issue is the same that we chuckled about back in the day, as Windows 98 cannot address more than 512 MB of RAM by default. Fortunately patches by [Rudolph Loew] helped to fix this and some other smaller issues.

Unfortunately neither Intel nor NVIDIA have released Win98 drivers for quite some time, so there’s no graphics acceleration beyond basic VESA support and the SoftGPU driver. Disk access goes via the BIOS too rather than using an NVMe driver, so it’s not as zippy as it could be, but for Win9x it’s quite usable.

Finally ACPI wasn’t recognized by Win98, but it’s only fair to blame that on the complete flaming train wreck that is ACPI rather than anything to do with Windows. This particular issue was worked around by configuring the BIOS to support S3 power state and with that making Win98 happy again.

It’s honestly quite a shame that UEFI-CSM is largely ignored by new systems, as it makes installing even Windows 7 basically impossible, and thus creating probably the largest split within the x86 ecosystem since the arrival of AMD64/x86_64.